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You have probably heard of dopamine. The substance also known as the "feel-good hormone."
Aug 7, 2024
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You have probably heard of dopamine. The substance also known as the "feel-good hormone."
Aug 7, 2024
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56
Grab a drink with friends at happy hour and you're likely to feel chatty, friendly and upbeat. But grab a drink alone and you may experience feelings of depression. Researchers think they now know why this happens.
Aug 6, 2024
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A new way to combat Alzheimer's disease has been discovered by Takaomi Saido and his team at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan. Using a mouse model, the researchers found that treatment with dopamine could ...
Aug 6, 2024
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DGIST Department of Brain Sciences Professor Lee Kwang and his team have discovered a new correlation between neural signaling in the brain and dopamine signaling in the striatum. The human brain requires fast neural signal ...
Aug 5, 2024
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Dopamine is a neurotransmitter occurring in a wide variety of animals, including both vertebrates and invertebrates. In the brain, this phenethylamine functions as a neurotransmitter, activating the five types of dopamine receptors — D1, D2, D3, D4, and D5, and their variants. Dopamine is produced in several areas of the brain, including the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area. Dopamine is also a neurohormone released by the hypothalamus. Its main function as a hormone is to inhibit the release of prolactin from the anterior lobe of the pituitary.
Dopamine can be supplied as a medication that acts on the sympathetic nervous system, producing effects such as increased heart rate and blood pressure. However, because dopamine cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, dopamine given as a drug does not directly affect the central nervous system. To increase the amount of dopamine in the brains of patients with diseases such as Parkinson's disease and dopa-responsive dystonia, L-DOPA (levodopa), which is the precursor of dopamine, can be given because it can cross the blood-brain barrier.
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